The US Is Stockpiling Nuclear Arms, and the Cost Is Astonishing

Overwhelmed with stories of high-level indictments, intrigues, investigations,
and scandals, the American public can be forgiven for missing revelations
about an issue of some importance: our nuclear weapons.

It’s an especially big investment for something you hope to never use. Nuclear
weapons aren’t cheap: According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost
of maintaining just the existing U.S. nuclear forces will be close to $800
billion; the shiny new stuff will be another $400 billion. “Many of
today’s nuclear weapons systems were designed and built decades ago,”
the CBO notes, “and are nearing the end of their service life.”

Nonetheless, as Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association put
it, the “stark reality underlined by CBO is that unless the US government
finds a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the nuclear weapons spending
plan inherited by the Trump administration will pose a crushing affordability
problem.”

“Uniquely destabilizing”

The New York Times headline
on the matter – “Trump Plans for Nuclear Arsenal Require $1.2 Trillion,
Congressional Review States” – is either an innocent mistake or a misleading
rhetorical sleight of hand. It implies, falsely, that this costly program
belongs to the 45th president, even though the first paragraph
of the CBO report explicitly states that it refers to “the Obama Administration’s
2017 budget request.”

This is not a trivial point.

Even if, like many Americans, you trust Barack Obama’s judgment more than
Donald Trump’s, you need to ask the deeper questions: Do I want any
president to preside over such a vast nuclear arsenal? Could even the most
sober and intelligent commander-in-chief make one catastrophic error in judgment?
Are there certain weapons that are inherently more dangerous than others,
regardless of who has the authority to push the button?

What about, for instance, the “new air-launched nuclear cruise missile,
the LongRange Standoff (LRSO) weapon,” which the CBO includes in its
list of “modernization” plans? The Air Force has trumpeted the
new missile’s unique
ability to “threaten enemy targets in vital areas potentially unreachable
by other weapons,” thereby providing an extra level of deterrence against
aggressors. Apparently, we need 1,000
of them.

The “deterrence” value of such an investment isn’t immediately
clear. It seems to require another nation’s leader to be thinking, “I
would have attacked the United States when they could only destroy
nine of my cities in twenty-four hours, but now they can destroy 50 of them,
so I will think twice.”

Leaving this dubious logic aside, at least one former secretary of defense
pointed out some of the problems presented by this new investment. “Because
they can be launched without warning and come in both nuclear and conventional
variants, cruise missiles are a uniquely destabilizing type of weapon,”
William Perry (defense secretary from 1994-1997) and Andy Weber (assistant
defense secretary for WMD defense programs from 2009-2014) wrote
in The Washington Post.

They quoted former British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond to underline
the LSRO’s issues. “A cruise-based deterrent would carry significant
risk of miscalculation and unintended escalation,” Hammond said. “At
the point of firing, other states could have no way of knowing whether we
had launched a conventional cruise missile or one with a nuclear warhead.
Such uncertainty could risk triggering a nuclear war at a time of tension.”

In other words, if we got into a so-called “conventional” war
and launched our regular cruise missiles, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Xi
Jinping – or whoever’s country we’re trying to destroy – may think we’ve
gone a step further and fulfilled the “fire and fury” promise.
I doubt they would respond politely.

Smaller, smarter – and easier to use

The Navy is also set to receive its own “upgrades”: a whole new
fleet of “Columbia-class” nuclear submarines. General Dynamics
Electric Boat has already been awarded a $5
billion contract for the development of the “next-generation nuclear-armed
ballistic missile submarines,” Scout Warrior reports, complementing
an earlier deal to manufacture “17 new tactical missile tubes able to
fire nuclear-armed Trident II D5 missiles.”

There are two reasons to be worried about this, even if we forget about the
price tag.

First, one of the scariest “back from the brink” moments occurred
underwater. On October 27, 1962 – in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis
– Navy destroyers dropped
“grenade-like” depth-charges on a Soviet submarine threatening
to breach the U.S.-imposed blockade of Cuba. As a result, historian Sheldon
M. Stern wrote, “the temperature in the submarine rose to over 133 degrees
and some crewmen lost consciousness.” The captain, furious but unable
to surface, “ordered the arming of a nuclear-tipped torpedo.”
In the end, it seems, he “actually gave the order to fire because he
believed that World War III had already begun” before being persuaded
to hold off by another officer.

Maybe – hopefully – better technology makes incidents like these unlikely
today. This might be true, but we shouldn’t seek consolation in the
fact that our modern nuclear weapons are smaller and more agile than our old
ones. Such “tactical” or “low-yield” weapons – whether
carried by submarines or jets – are arguably more dangerous than massive,
lumbering “Tsar Bombas.”

The reason is simple: We’ll be more tempted to use them. We have, after
all, toyed with the idea of “limited nuclear war” – which is a
bit less believable than “The Boys Will be Home Before Christmas”
– many
times since World War II.

“Gain such a victory, and what would you do with it?”

Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe a trillion dollars, “tactical” weapons, Columbia-class
submarines, and 1,000 nuclear cruise missiles are exactly what we need to
have the edge in a nuclear confrontation – to destroy our opponents before
they destroy us.

“No matter how well prepared for war we may be, no matter how certain
we are that within 24 hours we could destroy Kuibyshev and Moscow and Leningrad
and Baku and all the other places that would allow the Soviets to carry on the
war, I want you to carry this question home with you: Gain such a victory, and
what do you do with it?”